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Throughout the project and time a deviation from baseline happens! a lesson is learned must be recorded.
Most organizations perform a lessons learned activity at the end of the project - this is the only time they perform such an activity. The problem with this approach is that lessons learned collected at this point can never be applied to the current project; your project is already done…
A key feature of the lessons learned activity is that, in a phase-gated process, it provides a checkpoint at which we can evaluate our progress to see how well we are performing and make adjustments moving forward. Elements that can be reviewed in a lessons-learned activity may additionally include some of the following:
• Why there were so many change requests and what can we do about it?
• Some stakeholders are very difficult to engage. This threatens certain project deliverables. What can we do better to engage them?
• Our unit testing needs improvement - let's identify activities and changes that can make it more effective.
A phase-end lessons learned review usually takes about an hour and can be of enormous benefit to the project team and stakeholders alike.
More Details
Make sure Lessons Learned are reviewed at the end of each project phase and ask:
• What’s working?
• What’s not working?
• What still puzzles us?
• Where can we improve our performance and what improvements can we implement?
Final Lessons learned at the project close can be used to review:
• Did we effectively address project issues?
• How effective were our performance improvement efforts?
• What would we do differently the next time?
• What new processes need to be institutionalized to improve the project process?
• And more…
The goal is to always learn from our mistakes so that we aren’t destined to repeat them. There are certain issues that arose on past projects that I will never forget and would do things differently in the future to ensure they didn’t happen again. But what about others? How can others benefit from issues that we encountered? That’s where the formalized concept of documenting ‘Lessons Learned’ comes into play.
